Embracing your "Doctor Who", or Are we Timelords?

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This is my first post so I hope I don't trip over myself.
I am currently in a thought loop about fact that we may be aliens, or at least the next logical evolutionary step for mankind.. I know a little heavy.
I'm going to throw my theory out there and see what sticks!

It is my personal belief that we as autistics are the next evolutionary step in human development, (now whether that is the result of aliens seeding DNA over the four corners of the globe or the process of evolution we might never know) and because we as a society have reached a "Global" scale that DNA now has the opportunity to express itself, how many Aspies on here are of mixed genetic heritage? Is that why the Rates Of "AUTISM" are accelerating, is it the natural byproduct of the activation of the homo sapiens BOX Gene?

We are from what I can asses from reading ENDLESS testimonials and stories from other Aspies, more suited to a different environment than the one we were born in. Do we belong on another planet, or are we just the natural evolutionary step to adapting to THIS one. With Inevitable climate change and a possible "meltdown" of "normal" society, are we just kind of waiting in the wings for our genetic predecessors to kill each other off in an overly emotional burst of Panic? Leaving this planet as solely our responsibility.

We communicate in a way that requires a much more sensitive approach to our environment and our lack of emotional "HANGUPS" that slow down "normal" people. Lack of emotional control is a limitation in my opinion and we as Aspies seem to only lose our cool when confronted with an illogical emotional response by someone who is not capable of thinking on a Global Scale. We as aspies don't have any difficulties comprehending things like 4th and 5th dimensional states ( at least the ones I've met) because we don't think in a linear way.

IF the environment were maintained with the "Great Balancing Act" in mind, we would be ideal candidates for survival, we have an innate sense of balance, which is why we upset so many people who do not have the ability to think like we do. They factor in irrational, and emotional factors in their logical process that may sometimes prevent them from seeing things in an "unbiased rational" way. Nature is a cold hearted mother, and she operates in a very matter of fact way. The Tiger has no empathy for the deer, the tiger knows it must feed it's cubs, if the tiger could speak to the deer, I'm sure it would apologize, and then eat the deer.

I'm not trying to sound arrogant in any way, but I do think I might be on to something, and I'm desperately looking for feedback. Are we X-men, and because we are in the minority we just haven't expressed our potential until now. With the global sustainability movement in the forefront of the press and "GO GREEN" as our new motto for the "in-crowd" could we actually be the people we have been waiting for. We could create a planet of Rare beauty and Lush Green Environments easily if more people on this planet were more like us. Is that what's happening? It seems so, but I'm an Aspie, so I need confirmation of my internal data.

to put it bluntly, Mother nature has a way of fixing herself, we as a species have upset the balance by not maturing at the same rate as our technology. Maybe this is mother natures way of Forcing us to mature in a way that works for her. A higher evolved subset of the human genome, much better adapted to instant communication, and also sensitive enough to be the appropriate caretakers of this planet.

I am also very much into native american spirituality/tribal living/sustainable culture and ecology and have often thought that WE are the "Pahana" that we have been waiting for.

It's a little heavy, I know, but I had to throw this out to the universe before I explode!

I would love to hear some feedback on this if there are like minds for the discussion.

WE ARE TIME LORDS, we just haven't figured out how to build our Tardis, YET.

That's really not how evolution works.


You are not. Trust me on that.


No. Stop anthropomorphizing nature. Evolution has no intentionality, it does not plan, it does not desire one result over another. It does not give a damn about sustainability or anything else.

Then what are your thoughts, this is a discussion, not a "right or wrong" debate, explain to me how you think evolution works. it's my understanding that adaptations in genetic difference are either an "Accident" through random environmental factors that mutate the genes, or through adaptive behavior that tends to produce a desired result because the constant breeding for an adaptive trait makes it dominant (The woodpecker for example). and I am anthropomorphizing nature as a way of communicating an idea. The actual process is much more complex, I am very aware of that complexity, I think I am quite in tune with that complexity actually, I was oversimplifying it for the purpose of brevity and to spark a logical discourse. I'm sure some people would rather not read through a stream of consciousness and allusion is just as good a tool as any. Lumping the process of selective and random systems interacting to create the "illusion" of a "plan" into one big thing called "mother nature" makes it a lot easier to get my point across.

Survival of the fittest means sustainable living, if a culture cannot sustain itself within the construct of the systems in which it is placed, it will die out.

I'm assuming you were assuming I was just some crazy hippy, you're right, but not as crazy as you think.

thanks for your input.

I find either that the intentionality in your expression either distorts your idea very heavily, or your idea actually does involve intentions and you just said it didn't because Orwell called you out on it.

Could you rephrase your ideas so that way there is no confusion.


Not at all. Survival of the fittest means that there are competitive processes, and those less suited to survival will be destroyed by those more suitable to survival. It has nothing to do with sustainability. Let's say that there are two predators hunting the same creature, one hunts sustainably, but the other hunts in a less sustainable manner but is more effective. Well, it may be the case that the sustainable hunter dies out, but the unsustainable one lives longer. This is still "survival of the fittest" but it shows that sustainable living isn't the real variable. In fact, nature rarely thinks all the way to sustainability, and often the real driving force of any existing sustainability is competition by predator and prey to both survive.

Perhaps you're right maybe I should rephrase the sustainability part,, we as Thinking animals have a choice, so I suppose the root of my question would be "Are we the product of our un-natural environment" I'm no expert on genetics which is probably why I started the discussion in the first place. lol But it APPEARS to me that we would be better adapted to an environmental system that was more in balance. Our innate abilities would be more of a survival tool than anything I can think of, we just haven't been given the right environment yet, or more bluntly we had the perfect environment for us oh say 1,000 years ago and we totally screwed it up. Now we have evolved and done so at a disproportionate rate to our environment, is our autism an Over-reaction to increased stress, overpopulation, increased cortico-steroid levels, etc. ie: the activation of the BOX Gene. The canaries in the coal-mine so to speak.

When you invoke a scientific principle like evolution, you have made it a right or wrong debate. There is no fuzziness or room for different opinion, there is only evidence and facts. One of the main requirements for evolution is differential reproductive success. Do autistics generally reproduce at a higher or a lower rate than non-autistics? Lower, of course. Autistics are not the "next step" in human evolution.


No. Evolution acts only in the present. Evolution can select for self-destructive traits as long as they are beneficial in the short term. Anything you do that increases the number of offspring you produce—even if it means that you will completely destroy your environment/food supply within a couple generations—will be favored by natural selection.

I really get the feeling that this is another projection of traits onto AS. Not something that AS naturally has.

I should have known better than to get in the pool with the big boys.

Ok let me ask it this way, Something causes AS,
I'm assuming it has to be one of two things, environmental, or genetic mutation. Or a complex interaction of the two.

isn't that a form of evolution?

our "survivability of the fittest" is irrelevant in the debate because we are no longer prey for anything other than each other, or microbial life that can kill us from disease, we have removed ourselves from the "evolutionary equation" so to speak. which is why I framed it in a more social context, and posted it under politics, religion and philosophy. How we function in our closed "societal system" in some places almost completely cut off from our natural environment. And doing things completely contrary to our survival as a species.

I don't want to sound like I'm loading this debate with a "save the world" overtone, I just wanted to hear others thoughts on the Possibility that we have impacted our own evolution by NOT being in the evolutionary equation. We are more than just at the "top of the food Chain" and I don't understand why that's such a huge leap in logic. The possibility that we are affecting the future genetic makeup of ourselves by how WE Interact with the environment is also, I don't think a huge leap in logic. If you keep dumping mercury in the water, the only people left will be people who have a high tolerance for mercury, If a volcano erupts and dumps mercury in the water it will again kill off anything that doesn't have the genetic advantage of high mercury tolerance. Until that volcano erupts it isn't an apparent advantage to have a high mercury tolerance, it's simply a genetic mutation and/or adaptation that gives the evolutionary advantage. In our case the only major contributing factor to our evolution would be environmental, or social, which is a forced un-natural environment.

Or are you saying humans don't evolve anymore and we're done.

Still open to any thoughts on this, maybe I'm just not getting my thoughts across clearly enough. And I'm definitely looking for more input to help me define the nature of my question.

I also just realized I'm not even factoring in the possibility of Eugenics as it;s own "social" construct affecting our "evolution".

That was a "Dune" moment boys and girls...

this is fun.

we are not timelords

I also think that we as a species are HIGHLY susceptible to environmental adaptive changes.
we have developed quite rapidly compared to other species, it is our adaptability that has ensured our survival up to this point.

So is AS an adaptation, and not a disorder?

Whew....

Well, in some sense yes, but in that same sense, Downs Syndrome could be described the same way.


You'll have to explain your idea more and deeper for me to understand then.

As it stands though, there is a lot of stuff that I really don't see much justification for. I mean, take your statement: "we would be better adapted to an environmental system that was more in balance" Do I think this is true? No, but rather an environment horribly out of balance is where people with AS seem to thrive, given that our skills are most useful with high IQ kinds of work. Even more so, mankind is really thriving more in this environment than any other given longer life-spans and greater levels of happiness.

Even further, I doubt we are "The canaries in the coal-mine so to speak." given that there is nothing wrong about being AS, and there is no reason to hold that AS is a sign of things to be *that* concerned about. I mean, I doubt that our issues are "stress and overpopulation" that much given that a lot of people have a lot of living space(particularly in America where owning a home is the ideal), and well... losing a job is probably no worse than losing the lives of a few children, or having loved ones die from a plague or whatever else have you.

I don't want to sound like I'm loading this debate with a "save the world" overtone, I just wanted to hear others thoughts on the Possibility that we have impacted our own evolution by NOT being in the evolutionary equation. We are more than just at the "top of the food Chain" and I don't understand why that's such a huge leap in logic. The possibility that we are affecting the future genetic makeup of ourselves by how WE Interact with the environment is also, I don't think a huge leap in logic. If you keep dumping mercury in the water, the only people left will be people who have a high tolerance for mercury, If a volcano erupts and dumps mercury in the water it will again kill off anything that doesn't have the genetic advantage of high mercury tolerance. Until that volcano erupts it isn't an apparent advantage to have a high mercury tolerance, it's simply a genetic mutation and/or adaptation that gives the evolutionary advantage. In our case the only major contributing factor to our evolution would be environmental, or social, which is a forced un-natural environment.

Or are you saying humans don't evolve anymore and we're done.

Still open to any thoughts on this, maybe I'm just not getting my thoughts across clearly enough. And I'm definitely looking for more input to help me define the nature of my question.[/quote]

Hi Arachne,
I agree with above posters, and perhaps go further than them by suggesting the following:

Your initial post actually suggests sentience on the part of nature somehow dictating evolution.
"DNA now has the opportunity to express itself"...

DNA does not express itself. It is coded information. Now, theists might suggest that the fact that DNA is coded implies a master code maker creating the code, but whatever you may believe, DNA itself is not expressing itself, because strings of DNA are not sentient.

You later say "Maybe this is mother natures way of Forcing us to mature in a way that works for her."

While you may concievably be using "mother nature" as a metaphor, the previous sentence does rather imply the notion that "Mother Nature" is some sort of deity that controls the fate of human kind. Why not just say "Gaia" instead of "Mother Nature", or "God," or "Goddess", or even "aliens from outer space"?

In other words, you need to sit and think about whether you are speaking as a scientist, or a religionist. I do know the two are not necessarily exclusive, but messed up as your thoughts are on this, it might help you to decide what is science in your "theory" and what is religion.

For the record, I'm a "religionist", with some scientific training, but have the sense not to claim any expertise on "scientific" matters, since linguistics is my main thing.

I wasn't saying that we were, I was suggesting the possibility that through the process of evolution or selective breeding we could be,

How many Aspies do you think are working on the large HC project?

I know my ideas a little fanciful, but is it sound logic?

Here to learn

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You ask is it sound logic...

Well, to be honest, it is... but only based on certain assumptions. So, before you ask whether your logic is sound, you should check that your premises are sound.

Do you believe that nature is sentient, and is driving human evolution?

Is man hurting nature so badly that "she" has no choice but to fight back?

These seem to me to be at the root of your theory...

If you accept these there are a few other issues that rise from them. I'd be interested in what you say.

If you want the best study in "logic" in rhetorical terms, I'd suggest a great book called "straight and crooked thinking." You obviously want to learn more about what you think, and why you think it, and how to get that across to others... this book is a great start, if you can find it.